Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries the medieval west lived through a whole series of transformations of a socio-cultural, economic and spiritual kind, enabling us to see this period as one of interest and containing exciting changes. In the area of spirituality these transformations had as their protagonists laymen and women of all social levels. They were the protagonists of an authentic rebellion against the established power and, therefore, against the Church which they accused of having a great temporal power, distancing themselves from the evangelical ideals, and of excluding them "a priori", precisely because of their lay condition, from the religious life, reducing them to a purely material universe. It was a struggle which had as its framework a religious and Christian context because the medieval western society was religious and Christian. They looked for ways of living that allowed them to reconcile a double demand: that of a life consecrated to the service of God and that of women and men Christians who lived in the century at the margins of the ecclesiastical structure.

This attitude, which gave rise to a great proliferation of movements of spiritual renovation, inside and outside the orthodoxy, brought with it a rupture with the order established by the Church; a rupture that for women was double: both as laywomen and as women. As women because from the theological point of view - but also from the medical and scientific – they were considered physiologically and spiritually weak, defective in body and moral strength and incapable - except in very few exceptions - of rising to the consideration of spiritual reality. In spite of these opinions the presence of women prevailed in all these movements and, even, they created a current of spirituality from them and for them, with total autonomy in relation to men. A current of spirituality that they endowed with so much strength and potency that they influenced not only the mysticism of their time, but also that of following centuries: we are referring to the Beguines.

The Beguines is a movement born at the end of the twelfth century in a specific geographical area - Flanders- Brabante - Renania, which spread rapidly to the north and South of Europe, and at whose heart we find women of all the social spectrum whose desire is to lead a life of intense spirituality, but not enclosed, as was socially sanctioned, but rather fully integrated into the then emerging towns.

The need for a specifically feminine space, created and defined by the women themselves, was felt and expressed in literary terms by Christine de Pisan at the beginnings of the fifteenth century in “Le livre de la Cité de Dames”, in which she imagines the building of a city, solid and impregnable, inhabited only by women. But some centuries before the women called Beguines had already materialised the existence of a space similar to that imagined by Christine.

Reclusion, beguinato or the pious are some of the names that make up this material space where the Beguines or recluses lived (in Catalonia these women were known by both names) and it took on diverse forms and dimensions, given that it might have been a cell, a house, a group of houses, or an authentic town within a town, like the great Flemish beguine areas, declared Patrimony of Humanity in 1998.

All of them, however, represent one same reality: a space that is not domestic, nor cloistered, nor heterosexual. it is a space that women share at the margin of the patriarchal kinship system, where spatial and communicative fragmentation was transcended and which kept itself open to the social reality that surrounded them, in which and on which they acted, thus diluting the secular and hierarchical division between public and private that, therefore, becomes open and closed at the same time. It was a space of transgression of the limits, tacit or written, imposed on women, unmediated by any kind of dependence or subordination, in which they act as agents who generate forms that are new, and of their own, of relationship and of feminine authority. A space which becomes symbolic on being set up as a reference point, as a model, in sum, for other women.

The origins of the reclusion of Saint Margarita, referred to in the first document, go back to the middle of the fourteenth century and, for a hundred years, it was always inhabited by women.

It began when a young woman of the Barcelona bourgeoisie retired to it, thus fulfilling her wish to lead a spiritual life without being subject to any obedience. At her death sor Sança, companion of saint Brígida, lived there, together with another Beguine called Teresa; and afterwards other women, always in small numbers. When Brígida entered to form part of this genealogy the reclusion was to become a community.

Brígida was the daughter of Ángela and the gentleman Francesc Terré. She belonged, then, to the Barcelona bourgeoisie. In 1426 her mother, together with her two brothers, gave her, before a notary, four thousand sueldos of her own with the annual pension of 36 pounds in the concept of the legitimate part and other rights owed to her. This guaranteed not only that she might live from her own patrimony but also the future of her community. In effect, a few years later, concretely in 1431, Brígida made a will and left the income that she disposed of to the women who lived with her in the reclusion: her mother Ángela, who had retired there on becoming a widow, sor Ginabreda, sor Eulalia and the neighbour Joana. This community, which would progressively get bigger, was known of with the name of the Terreres, that is, with the feminised surname of Brígida.

The women who made up the community of the Terreres lived –and had lived- as Brígida says in her petition, in holy conversation, an expression that reveals to us the importance of the word in the community, a word that carries a relational meaning and that we can understand in the meaning of the communication and the transmission of knowledge amongst them, as well as in the direct relationship that is not mediated with divinity.

Indeed, one of the characteristic features of the Beguine spirituality is that of the search for a union with God in the realm of an exclusive relationship between them and the divinity, outside of all liturgical ceremony and the socially obliging mediation of the clerics.

It was precisely the free action of these women, many of whom interpreted and preached the Sacred Writings freely at their will in the maternal tongue, which, from the beginning, awoke the suspicions of the ecclesiastical hierarchies. Many suffered suspicion and persecutions from the Inquisition and some were even burned in the public square: this was the case of the French Beguine Marguerite Porete.

The fact of living in a reclusion did not mean, then, isolation from the world. On the contrary, the insertion in the urban framework, where they had an active presence, constitutes a fundamental and inseparable part of their spirituality. Their dedication to the spiritual life brought with it a projection onto the public sphere through the moral authority that they enjoyed and of the development of a whole series of helping tasks. A good proof of this, in Catalonia, are the duties that the Terreres carried out and that, for sure, they had been doing since the beginning of the reclusion: the attention to the sick, the teaching of poor girls or the mediation in death. A mediation that took on special relevance in the case of sor Sança, as can be gathered from the royal privilege that she enjoyed.

Thus, the Beguines, with their practice of life, reconciled action and contemplation, the two backbones of spirituality that the ecclesiastics have always presented as being opposed and in hierarchy. For them, however, both concepts became the sides of one same coin.

The phenomenon of the laicization of religion, which took place from the twelfth century on, made the clerics unable to keep control over the monopoly of the role of intermediaries with the divine. A role that they began to share with those secular people in whom society recognised a special authority.

In all Europe, the Beguines received numerous testamentary legacies in order for them to carry out a series of tasks related to death and the transition of the soul towards the Beyond. Thus, they prayed for the salvation of the donor, they participated in the funerals and they accompanied the body of the deceased to the cemetery. But they also had the care of the body of the dying, they watched over it and shrouded it. This mediation with death became one of their main activities and gave them a social function that made them indispensable.

The care of the body of the sick and dying that the Beguines carried out constitutes a spiritual practice that is intimately linked to compassion and solidarity, a practice and feelings that we find expressed in the work of Matilde de Magdeburgo and that sor Sança embodies on asking the King to allow her to give burial to the bodies of those hung at the gallows.

The concession of the privilege by the King supposes an implicit recognition of authority of sor Sança, an authority that was very probably recognised by the inhabitants of the city of Barcelona and which the King echoes.

The Beguines embodied one of the freest experiences of feminine life in history. Lay and religious at the same time, they lived with total independence from masculine control – either family or ecclesiastical - and the freedom that they enjoyed is inseparable from the network of relationships that they established: of a primary form amongst them, with God “sine medio”, and with the rest of the women and men of the towns where they lived.

The way of living and understanding the world of these women spread rapidly through all western Europe until it became an authentic movement, both in the number of women who joined it and in the wide social spectrum that they belonged to. It was a movement that always moved in the tenuous limits that often separate orthodoxy from heterodoxy.

The space of freedom that they represent situates them in a “beyond” of the patriarchal social-symbolic order in its medieval form, transcending its binary and hierarchical structuring. They generated something new and, in consequence, unforeseen in the culture of the period. They were original, because they were the origin. A space that was rooted materially in the houses that they inhabited, immersed in the fabric of the city, with which they interacted constantly, offering, both in death and life, their mediation.

We want to emphasise the importance of analysing, putting them into relationship, the two documents. From the first one we hear the direct voice of a Barcelona Beguine, a woman of the bourgeoisie who goes to form part of a Beguine community that already exists in the city of Barcelona, whose history is unravelled. From this history we can establish the existence of a feminine spiritual genealogy. The second document allows us to know better one of the women who formed part of it.

The analysis of both documents, considered together, offers us the possibility of establishing the main features of the Beguines' way of life.